Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Modern Idolotry and Oil (Re: Archbishop's letter to Sec. State Baker) Message-ID: Date: 6 Dec 90 08:50:19 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 84 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz) posts: [Archbishop Roger Mahony's letter to Sec. State Baker concerning the Persian Gulf]. To which the moderator comments: >[I have mixed feelings about posting this. I'm not interested >into turning into talk.politics.mideast. However if people >have specifically Christian perspectives on the issues, this >is the right place to talk about them. --clh] Being the "instigator" here, I understand the concern. I do appreciate however, that the letter was posted anyway. There are some basic questions that we as Christians should be asking in connection to the Persian Gulf crisis ... not so much about "geopolitics", but about what kind of a society have we built, if we have to go out and *kill* for oil?? Last year I read an interview of Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit Priest from the Central American University in El Salvador. (That's the same university that the 6 Jesuit Priests/housekeeper/her daughter were killed at last year. Sobrino survived ... but only because he was at a conference in Thailand when it all happened. Interesting as all that may be, that's for "another story" however...). Anyway, one thing that struck me in the interview (by NCR -- National Catholic Reporter) were Sobrino's thoughts on what he called "the idols of death." Sabrino maintained that idols are alive and well today. No not the stone statues of ages past, but in false concepts that seduce people away from God. At first, the idol is seductive and cheap, but it progressively demands more and more to pay it homage. In the end it is satisfied with nothing less than human sacrifice paid in bodies and blood. When I read this, I immediately thought of abortion. But it is perhaps enlightening to look at the current situation in the Persian Gulf through this prism, and start asking some fundamental questions about our society and about our faith. In the last two decades, we have been preoccupied with oil. The oil shocks of the 1970s, various devastating oil spills, pollution, possibly even the green house effect, etc, etc. But never before have we been in a situation where we are (in all probability) going to go to war and start *killing* in order to get our oil. We go to church, we talk of God being the "source of our strength" And yet, our whole civilization, our way of thinking, is built on material things such as oil. This may seem silly almost ... but in all honesty, is this a form of apostacy? Is our talk of God ... high-minded bunk ... when we contemplate killing for oil or chromium or what-have-you. It is hard to imagine a world without oil, without ever larger numbers of gizmos that suck materials from somewhere ... but certainly we can all see that so long as our civilization depends "choke hold" minerals which clearly are not distributed equally across the globe ... we're going to have to inevitably KILL for them. One could write a whole treatise on the effects that rampant materialism ... peck silicone impants ... and all. But again, never before have we been asked to contemplate KILLING ... in order to preserve "this way of life" as we are (in connection with the Iraq crisis) today. dennis kriz@skat.usc.edu [There is of course also the fact that one nation has just invaded and wiped out another. Experience suggests it is unwise to ignore such actions. The extent to which the "real" motivations of those involved is simply a desire for cheap oil or is a determination not to let the prelude to WWII be replayed is to some extent a matter of speculation. My impression is that most Christians would not believe we can justify war to force a country to sell us oil. Judgements about the actual motivations of the people involved are beyond what I think I want to get into here, though they are certainly necessary in order for us to decide how we as Christians should react. --clh]